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Published November 2015 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Wormhole and Entanglement (Non-)Detection in the ER=EPR Correspondence

Abstract

The recently proposed ER=EPR correspondence postulates the existence of wormholes (Einstein-Rosen bridges) between entangled states (such as EPR pairs). Entanglement is famously known to be unobservable in quantum mechanics, in that there exists no observable (or, equivalently, projector) that can accurately pick out whether a generic state is entangled. Many features of the geometry of spacetime, however, are observables, so one might worry that the presence or absence of a wormhole could identify an entangled state in ER=EPR, violating quantum mechanics, specifically, the property of state-independence of observables. In this note, we establish that this cannot occur: there is no measurement in general relativity that unambiguously detects the presence of a generic wormhole geometry. This statement is the ER=EPR dual of the undetectability of entanglement.

Additional Information

© 2015 The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Article funded by SCOAP3. Received: September 23, 2015; Accepted: October 31, 2015; Published: November 19, 2015. We thank Sean Carroll and Clifford Cheung for helpful discussions. This research was supported in part by DOE grant DE-SC0011632 and by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant 776 to the Caltech Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics. N.B. is supported by the DuBridge postdoctoral fellowship at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. G.N.R. is supported by a Hertz Graduate Fellowship and a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1144469.

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Published - art_10.1007_JHEP11_2015_126.pdf

Submitted - 1509.05426v1.pdf

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